I got my Sony 650 in Oct 2010 and the first book I read on it was a Peter Mayle novel that I downloaded from the library. Vintage-something in the title. It was truly terrible. Luckily, I did not let my opinion of that book influence my opinion of ereading or my ereader.

Well, the first book on a dedicated ereader, that I bought and read as opposed to free and flick through (Alice in Wonderland) was either Back to the Moon by Homer Hickam, or Black Rubber Dress one of the few available mysteries when I bought my Rocket eBook at the end of 1999.

I worked in the dotcom world back then so my first Rocket purchase was a subscription to Industry Standard. Hey, I still had 18 months before all my stock options totally imploded.

Hmm, I have heard from a lot of people whose first ereader was a palm something. Are palms really good at reading electronic books?

Palms, the varieties I had, had a fairly decent quality reflective LCD screen which was sharp and large enough to be a good reader. Some had front (or side) lighting, some had digital watch style electroluminescence for night reader.
They are small, reasonable affordable, and had good battery life.
They also had fairly big supply of content formatted for them from the various PDB and PRC sources.

I didn't think they were very good at all, but it was the first thing I had with a reasonable-sized screen and decent battery life. It was just an emergency backup, for me, for when I was away from home or didn't have anything else to read (imagine that! ).

All I've Ever Wanted on my Nook classic. It was a pretty run of the mill romance that I borrowed from the library but it was great to finally read an e-book on an e-reader. Now my very first e-book on any device was Persuasion on my iPod Touch.